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Thursday, September 18, 2014

Basically, Jason Rezaian, a dual Iranian and American citizen, has been detained for eight weeks in Iran. No charges have been announced against him, which is in keeping with the way Iran treats its citizens. And there is nothing that the United States can really do, other than ask Iran to release him.

This is just a quick reminder, since dual citizenship is so rarely in the news, of what it means and the potential bad consequences, in the case of a dual citizen of Iran and the U.S. When you are in one country of which you are a citizen, that country will treat you only as its citizen, and totally ignore the claim any other country may have on you. And there is essentially nothing your "other" country of citizenship can do to help you, if you get in trouble.

Being a citizen of Iran, this journalist is an Iranian when he is in Iran and an American when he's in America. Just as the U.S. ignores the Iranian citizenship of dual citizens when they are in the U.S., so Iran ignores the U.S. citizenship of its citizens when they are in Iran. It's safe to say the justice system there is not what we would expect in the U.S.A.

Saturday, September 13, 2014

Do you remember the 1982 Tylenol scare? I sure do. It was the talk of my school. Capsules
were found to contain cyanide, and ultimately, seven people died. As Randy Shilts writes in And the Band Played On, when faced with
such a threat to lives, the U.S.A. is capable of reacting swiftly and
dramatically. The story was in The New
York Times every day of October and twenty-three more times after that, as well as in media throughout the land.
Within days, the Food and Drug Administration had cleared shelves across the
country of Tylenol capsules, which have never been seen again (we got “caplets”
after that). “No action was too extreme and no expense too great,” Shilts
writes, “to save lives….

“By comparison, 634 Americans had been stricken with
AIDS by October 5, 1982. Of these, 260 were dead. There was no rush to spend
money, mobilize public health officials, or issue regulations that might save
lives.”

Shilts’s
thesis is ‘that AIDS did not just happen to America—it was allowed to happen.”
His exhaustive research and interviews with almost a thousand people makes this
hard to argue with, but this book doesn’t read like research. It is 600 turnable pages of interweaving plots, and
reads like a massive whodunit. There are certainly bad guys: members of the gay
community risking public health for sexual liberation, since that was the only
liberation gays had; a researcher at the National Cancer Institute more
concerned about recognition than about doing science the right way; a negligent
industry of blood banks; a president of the United States who kept insisting
that America's best days were ahead, while never even uttering the name of a
disease that was killing his people. Public health workers who were too worried
about making his administration look good to demand the resources they really
needed. News media so biased towards heterosexual males that only the
possibility of them contracting AIDS--from a prostitute--could get the disease
into the headlines. Shilts excoriates them all.

But there are great
characters, too. Larry Kramer, the writer and cofounder of Gay Men's Health
Crisis, who never let up on New Yorkers, gay or straight, for not doing enough
to stop the epidemic. Kramer is one of our prophets; in his 1985 play The Normal Heart, his alterego cries, "Why didn't you guys fight for the right to get married instead of the right to legitimize promiscuity?" Bill Kraus, the San Francisco gay liberationist, likewise saw what needed to be done and insisted on it, even while becoming
sick himself. Dr. Selma Dritz at the San Francisco Department of Public Health,
with her methodical records chronicling the earliest days of the epidemic. A
drug technician at the Centers for Disease Control named Sandra Ford, who paid
such close attention to the orders crossing her desk that she was the first
person to alert the federal government to a new syndrome. Dr. Don Francis, the
epidemiologist, who had fought smallpox and the Ebola virus in Africa and was
damned if he was going to let up on AIDS. And—five years late, but better than never—the Surgeon
General, Dr. C. Everett Koop.

Shilts’s book was published in 1987, and so many
things have happened since then that it’s really remarkable how
up-to-the-minute tense I was reading it. The biology of the disease is, of
course, a major strand of the plot. Much of what we know today about the virus
that causes AIDS is discovered in the course of this book, but some things were
not known then. For example, one of the main diseases affecting people with
AIDS is Pneumocystis pneumonia, caused by an organism that when Shilts was writing was
thought to be “protozoa” found in rats. The species is now known to be a
fungus, and distinct from Pneumocystis carinii. Shilts is writing
about disease and sexual behavior, and a lot of this is not nice stuff to talk
about at the dinner table—one of the reasons so little was done to help for so
long. From start to finish, Shilts does a fantastic job of holding readers’
interest, making us understand the science, the politics, and the personal stories
that make up an epidemic on this scale.

This was not, and is not, an uncontroversial book.
Although it is only one of many subplots (and by no means the largest),
Shilts’s story of Gaëtan Dugas, the Canadian flight attendant who was “Patient
Zero” in early epidemiological research, was used as publicity to sell And the Band Played On. U.S. news media
loved the story of the foreigner who brought AIDS to the United States—a single
villain, so much easier to blame than the Reagan administration, self-aggrandizing
U.S. scientists, or indeed themselves. (Shilts spends many more pages
castigating the news media for their failure to investigate AIDS than he spends on
Dugas).

Nowhere does Shilts claim that Gaëtan Dugas or any
other individual brought the AIDS virus to North America, but the real
epidemiological history—from Africa to Europe, and from Africa to North America
via Haiti—was only incompletely understood in Shilts’s time. We now know that
cases of HIV existed in the 1970s and even earlier—long
before Dugas was sexually active. Dugas is characterized as willfully spreading
the disease by continuing promiscuous sexual behavior. It is hard to forgive
such acts with what we now know about the virus, but it didn’t make him unique,
nor was this recklessness unknown among carriers of other venereal diseases.
Ultimately, Dugas is not the villain of And
the Band Plays On, if only because he, too, had an incomplete picture of
what he was really carrying. He remained more or less healthy long after other
men diagnosed at the same time were dying of AIDS; scientists were still
squabbling about what this was and how it was transmitted. It’s clear from
Shilts’s many portraits of people with AIDS that Dugas wasn’t the only one in
denial about it.

One of the most heartbreaking parts of this story is how those
trying to do good were frustrated at every turn. The Blood Sister Project of
San Diego, for example, enlisted lesbians to donate blood, because lesbians were as low-risk as possible for disease; the blood was then used to help patients
with AIDS. The Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr. Edward Brandt, was scheduled to give the Blood Sister Project
an award; he considered it “a worthy example of the kind of community program
called for in President Reagan’s cry for more volunteerism.” But “pro-family”
groups demanded Brandt’s firing if he even went to the event, since that would
legitimize a lifestyle so repugnant that it
could not even be named. The administration nixed his appearance. With the 1984
election coming up, Reagan’s people didn’t want any association with AIDS or
gays--as if any number of votes from the Jerry Falwell camp could have swung
the election to Mondale, who won exactly one state.

The relentlessly mounting body count, of which we
are reminded again and again while AIDS is “allowed to happen” to the U.S., is
not tragic--tragedy has an air of inevitability. This is angering because it
was not inevitable. Shilts shows how the news media, in which he was the only
American reporting on the epidemic full time, largely ignored the crisis for
years, and when it did get into the act it stuck to the science angle and
always insisted on some kind of hopeful ending. There was always a breakthrough
just around the corner—except there wasn’t. Viruses are too hard to vaccinate
against or cure (which is why we still have colds), and nobody wanted to pay
for it anyway. Government was bad and the president would rather spend tax
money on Central American death squads. When French scientists made a
discovery, well, they were only French, so we didn’t hear about it for a year.
And too many people at risk for AIDS—from gay and bisexual men to those using
intravenous drugs—continued suicidal behavior long after they should have been
educated out of it. (Any such statement, from Shilts or his contemporaries, was
condemned as “anti-gay.”)

Of course, the U.S. was extremely anti-gay in the early 1980s, so none of those aspects
of the book were news to me. What did surprise me was how long the nonprofit
blood “industry” resisted any attempts to make its products safe, denying that
it was possible to contract AIDS from a transfusion, or from the clotting
products that patients with hemophilia relied on. I had assumed, when I lived
through the period, that at the first sign of an “innocent” person getting
AIDS—that is, not a homosexual or a drug user—the government and industry had
leaped into action to protect people, but this was far from true. Thousands of people whose only risk
factor for AIDS was a blood transfusion got sick and died needlessly. So did
the female partners of drug users and their babies—ironically, more victims of
homophobia, since part of the reason AIDS was not recognized in heterosexual
women or babies for so long was that it was a “gay disease.” (This partly
explains the bias against French scientists working on AIDS, too, since the
French didn’t think of SIDA as a gay disease but as a disease that came from
somewhere—a virus, West or Central Africa.)

It’s amazing how so many people resisted antibody
testing, and other measures of AIDS control, for so many years. But have we
really learned? Today, a terrifying proportion of U.S. parents refuse to get
their kids vaccinated against basic childhood illnesses. File this under
bottomless scientific illiteracy (see also climate change, evolution, and the
dismantling of public education).

By the time Ronald
Reagan made his first speech about AIDS, it was 1987. He still could not bring
himself to say “gay” or make any acknowledgment of the burden homosexuals had
borne—both of the disease and of the fight against it. But this is not a
Republican versus Democrat story. In 1982, when the epidemic was still in its
early stages, even the most supportive of any straight politician in the
nation, San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, had vetoed a domestic partners’
ordinance. This law would have recognized the right to (among other things)
visit your live-in lover in a city hospital, or take bereavement leave for his
funeral. Perhaps the most damning sentence in this whole book is:

“In December 1982, at a time
when gay people more than ever needed to be encouraged into relationships, they
were told their partnerships were valueless by institutions that later
scratched their heads and wondered why gays didn’t settle into couples when it
was so clear their lives were at stake.”

The soul of a nation is laid bare by Shilts’s book,
and many aspects of it are found wanting. But—at the risk of one of those
hopeful endings he was so scornful of—it could have been worse. Gay Americans,
already far from equal, feared that AIDS would lead to their being quarantined
or even put in internment camps. There were plenty of homophobic attacks in the
AIDS era, but the concentration camps never materialized. Shilts attributes
this to Americans’ basic belief that it is wrong and unnatural for young people
to die, so that sympathy welled up for thousands of twenty- and
thirty-something men dying of a hideous disease—even though they were homosexual. Similarly, while there were
stories of partners rejecting AIDS-infected men, and families throwing
their “faggot” lovers out of the hospital room, in far more cases both chosen families and families of
origin rallied around their sick and dying members. Many parents learned their
son’s sexual orientation at the same time as his AIDS diagnosis. When faced
with this deadly disease, its horrible manifestations, and the unsavory ways it
was transmitted that no one wanted to talk about, by and large people chose
to respond with love.

Randy Shilts would not let his doctor tell him the
result of his own HIV test until the day he finished this book. He was afraid
that it might bias the way he told the tale, and he was nothing if
not a classic journalist—reporting the facts as he found them, no matter how
unpopular. Shilts died of AIDS in 1994, just after finishing his third book,
about gays and lesbians in the U.S. armed forces. Like those unacknowledged heroes,
this journalist performed great service to his country.

Next week, on the 18thof September, residents of Scotland
aged 16 and over will vote in a referendum on Scottish independence. If they
choose Yes, Scotland will become an independent nation and no longer part of
the United Kingdom.

The fact that many people think that British means the
same thing as English, or have never heard of the UK, might tell you why Scots
feel the need to have this vote.

I’ve been to Edinburgh and Glasgow many times, but
this month marks my first visit out of the cities to any other part of
Scotland. And it was stunningly beautiful. No sooner had we left the Glasgow
airport than we were driving by beautiful lochs, up hill and down, to
Portsonachan where the water is brackish and you can't drink it unboiled.

The hotel was a rambling old thing, with a deadpan
English bartender who played Simon and Garfunkel and Frank Sinatra more or less
continuously. We overlooked Loch Awe so that from our window, it seemed we were
on the water--so calm and clear. The first morning the mist was lying so low
that we appeared to be in a cloud. It was not a bad view, watching the mist
slowly lift while we ate full Scottish breakfasts in the conservatory!

The quirky hotel also featured tables that appeared to
be held up by sculpted dogs and hippos. In the lobby, such as it is, is a whole
cabinet of stuffed birds and animals--not my thing, but they've probably been
there forever. The library, a gloomy room stuffed with old furniture, has
shelves lined with Harvard Classics and Reader's Digest Condensed Books that
have probably been there forever too. The most interesting feature, though, has
got to be the bathtub. You have to fill it with what appears to be loch water;
the only thing the water comes out of is a shower head, but it's very low down
in the tub so you can't actually use it as a shower. All the taps, as I believe
the British call them, are turned around so it's anyone's guess what is cold
and hot. I was strangely comforted to find that it's still possible to have such
a hotel experience, that everything hasn't been homogenized down to Eurogeneric
standards. "Part Waratah Lodge [Victoria]," T. summarized, "part
Fawlty Towers!"

The weather, ever uncooperative on the whole island of
Britain, was beautiful, which made all the difference. This is one aspect of our trip that makes me think Scotland
belongs in the Union and should not separate from the UK. Obsessing with the
constantly changing weather is such a British thing; it’s not just an English
or a Scottish thing. Another aspect was the proliferation of campaign signs
across the Scottish landscape. For every “Yes” sign we saw, there was a sign
next or near to it that said “No Thanks.”

Not “No,” but “No Thanks.” How British is that? Only a
British campaign would word “No” so politely.

We were not in Scotland, however, to talk politics,
but to appreciate this very different landscape. It’s remote, with single lane
roads and bleak stony mountains rising up towards the sky. We saw deer, and
even the threatened red squirrel. I see grey squirrels every day around London,
but never the native red species.

We spent
time around Loch Fyne, after which some very nice ales are named. There was
also a little "drive to nowhere" when we were directed just to
"drive to the end of the road," the single-lane road, which turned
out to be twenty miles. Since there was still nothing at the end of it, we gave
up and returned to the hotel bar. I consoled myself with a 10-year-old single
malt whisky called Tobermory. I rarely drink whisky, but couldn't resist one
called after what is obviously a Scottish place name, but also a very nice
place at the northern end of the Bruce Trail in Ontario.

Our
second day we explored Argyll and further north to Glencoe. There were Scots
Gaelic place names on all the signs as well as English, but I won't attempt to
spell those. The most direct way to where we were going was evidently another
single lane "B" road, ten miles long, in the course of which we
passed I think one other car. We stopped at a place called Catnish, wondering
if we would ever find a place to get off and walk; this is unspoiled country
without a footpath crossing every field! A very friendly localgaveus his ordnance survey map,
probably thinking how silly we were to set off without one. We thence drove on
to a weir and walked a mile or so into the Caledonian Forest Reserve. There was
no one else on the trail the whole time we were there.

At the
Bridge of Orchy, which appears to be only a hotel along the side of the road,
we stopped for a drink, which we probably didn't deserve as much as the hikers
who kept crossing there. T. asked a couple "Are there any walks over
there?" and they kindly pointed up the hill.

"Well,
that's the West Highland Way!" they said. We had, despite our map, only stumbled across the most massive hiking trail in Scotland, which runs all the way up to Inverness.

They were clearly North
American, so T. asked where they were from and when they said
"Canada," she told them I was from Toronto. I did not correct this!

Gord and
Marg, as I'll call them, are from Saskatchewan, over here hiking the whole trail. I imagine that they've just taken retirement, perhaps early
retirement, and walking the West Highland Way is something they've always
wanted to do, but never could, you know, because of limited vacation time and
it being so far from Canada. So the minute their pensions kicked in they were
off to Scotland, to appreciate their heritage while they're still limber enough
to do the whole walk. You go, Marg and Gord. As for us, we only walked enough
of the West Highland Way to say we'd done it, and to see a rainbow emerge from
the mist.

Our next walk was to Glencoe village. At Glencoe we
saw the site of the 1698 massacre of dozens of MacDonalds, including many women
and children who died of winter exposure after their homes were burned down.
The MacDonalds, murdered by guests they had taken in, were being punished for
their slowness in acclaiming the new monarchs of England, William and Mary.

William and Mary’s accession to the throne has been
called the Bloodless Revolution. Hate to see the bloody ones.

It is hard to describe the stark beauty of
Glencoe, Glen Etive, and the scenery around there, accessed via the luxury of a
two lane road. Even driving aimlessly, we were not any place in Scotland for
any amount of time that was not stunning. This included the bar of the 1720
George Hotel (how royalist is that?), acclaimed as "the best bar in
Scotland." Just looking at the array of whiskies made my head spin, never
mind drinking one. They even used whisky in the black chanterelle and cream
sauce--very nice indeed with a Scottish steak, if you eat that sort of thing.

On Sunday we made our way around Loch Awe to the
other side, past St. Conan's Kirk, and to Oban on the west coast. From the
harborfront there you can see (or sail) across to the Hebridean isles, Mull and
Iona. The summer season was over but it was still warm enough to sit on the
rocky beach and eat ice cream. There is a kind of folly or art work, McCaig
Tower, that is meant to resemble the Colosseum; I trudged up there to take in
the view, only to find there was a parking lot at the top and barely mobile
ancient people were getting around McCaig Tower just fine!

Thanks, again, to the donated map, we found an
unmarked turnoff on the road back that led us to walk to Kilchurn Castle. This
castle was built between the 15th and 17th centuries, and it's just open for
people to climb all over--so refreshing for a European site. From the tower, we
could see back to St. Conan's Kirk, which we would have gone inside and
apparently seen all kinds of historical relics, except they were actually
having church (it was Sunday morning after all). The same might not have been
true in Bridge of Orchy, where the little church only hosts services every
other Sunday, plus the post office on Tuesdays!

The view
of Loch Awe from Kilchurn Castle was one of those rare "wow" moments
where I had no room in my heart for anything but appreciating the
sunshine.

It was one of the calmest, most restorative trips I can remember. An Oban-born lady who had suggested
visiting there was as delighted as she could be that we'd had a nice time. When we hung out on the patio, or whatever Scots call it, the
surface of the loch varied from choppy to smooth as glass. Sometimes you
couldn't even hear the water lapping.

Our last
stop was Balloch, where we cruised around the more famous Loch Lomond. I
recommend haddock, if you're ever up that way. Smoked haddock and poached egg
for breakfast, or haddock chowder at the Samphire seafood restaurant in
Inverary--probably the best soup I ever put in my mouth. It's a small place,
though, and fills up quickly. Best to reserve.

I hope the voters in Scotland decide to stay in the
307-year-old union. Not only because breakups are sad, but because I like
having some connection with this gorgeous country, even though I don’t live
there.

In September I am trekking Mount Kilimanjaro for Oxfam.

My author Web site

About Me

Walking the line between discretion and paranoia, I am always writing and travel as much as I can. My first novel, Arusha, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. My second novel is The Trees in the Field.